The First Time I Fell In Love...

I was ten.
Oh sure, there were times before that when I thought it was the real thing. There was that flirtation in kindergarten with a character named Sam (but he was such a fussy eater). And there were a few brief dalliances in second and third grade. To be honest, I hardly remember their names.
Don't think for a moment that my tender age meant it wouldn't last forever. Years later (okay, let's be honest and say decades later) I still think about it. The real thing happened in fourth grade. It was the first time I ever fell in love... with a book (and a book character).
Lucy Maud Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables was my first love.
It happened fast, before Anne Shirley walked on the roof, or met her best friend, Diana, or got called "carrots" by Gilbert Bylthe. The moment she said the words "Anne with an e" and wished her name was Cordelia, I was hooked. It seems she had me at hello. (btw, I know I'm not the only one. If you love this book, I bet you fell for it at the "Anne with an e" part too.)
I remember other moments: how she thought it would be perfectly fine to spend a moonlit night sleeping in a cherry tree and how thrilled she was to drive under a canopy of flowering trees and how she gave everything a better name (I still rename things. I'm not sure if I picked it up from this story or if it's something Anne and I always had in common).
I only read the book once. It never occurred to me to read it again, and I never moved on to the rest of the Anne books either. In my ten-year-old mind, this was a perfect moment. Why ruin it with repetition and destroy a wonderful memory?
But yesterday, I was in a perfect moment/memory destroying mood. I wondered if the decades blurred the imperfections or if I'd fall in love all over again. So for the first time since I was ten, I read the first three chapters.
Here's what I learned:
Anne Shirley doesn't even appear in chapter one. (Hmm. So does the first chapter build suspense for the big meeting or should Lucy M. Montgomery have moved into the action faster?). The first sentence is 137 words long, not exactly the short, attention-grabbing hook we look for nowadays. Of course, the book is over a hundred years old. Perhaps in 1908, lengthy opening sentences were the norm. But that first line still grabbed me. In those scant 137 words, I knew all about the neighbor, Rachel Lynde (aka, the nosiest person in town).
And Anne? When she finally shows up in chapter two, she steals my heart all over again. I was amazed at how much I remembered. As soon as we meet her, she talks about that wild cherry tree: "...it would be lovely to sleep in a wild cherry-tree all white with bloom in the moonshine, don't you think?" And she calls the "the long canopy of snowy fragrant blooms" the first thing she ever saw "that couldn't be improved upon by imagination" and renames Barry's Pond the "lake of shining waters". And of course, she talks about her name "Anne with an e" (which I agree is so much more 'distinguished' than Ann.)
I wish I could congratulate myself for having extraordinary powers of retention. The truth is that my mind is often sieve-like. Remarkably important pieces of information often pass through my brain, unnoticed by my memory. But Anne of Green Gables isn't locked into my mind. It's etched into my heart. And when something touches your heart, you remember.

Remembering the Present

I have this odd holiday ritual. At some point during the day, I slip away from the festivities, find a quiet place, then close my eyes and try to take in every single detail of the celebration: The people. The voices. The laughter. The music. The food (I pay special attention to the food). Who and where my friends are. The clothes I’m wearing. What my hair looks like (even if it’s a bad hair day). The weather. The conversations. Everything.

Of course, I take in all those joyful moments, but if there are times of stress, I think about that too. Good or bad. Ordinary or remarkable. Whatever is happening during the day, I let it sink inside me.

This year, I noted that seemingly arbitrary sentences caused my older brother to break out in song, that my sister’s homemade gluten-free pizza is getting better and better, that my niece seems like she’s at a great place in her life and that those super cute shoes I found in the back of my closet were way too tight (btw, there’s always a very good reason why you stopped wearing shoes stored in the back of your closet. It’s best not to put them on ever again.)

I’m not sure how this started, but I’ve been doing it ever since I was a child. I wonder if it came from a book I read. Some of my best ideas came from those middle grade books.

After I’m convinced that I’ve taken in every detail, I tell myself to remember. Then I imagine all those holiday images wrapped up and stored somewhere in my mind. I hope I’ll be able to retrieve them in the future. After all, you never know when you’ll need a memory.

(The shrimp in the picture was cooked by my younger brother for one of our holiday celebrations and is definitely worth remembering)

Holly Trees and Letting Go

Every summer when I was a kid, my family would take the long drive from my New York home to my Great Aunt Lil’s place on the Jersey shore. She lived with my other aunts and uncles in a cottage-style house filled with surprising rooms and quirky spaces. The major attractions were the built-in pool and the pool house where my aunt cooked up amazing summer treats. No one made buttered carrots like Aunt Lil.

In her basement there were shelves filled with books left over from her teaching days. I read them all. Ballet Shoes. The Bobbsey Twins. Anne of Green Gables. On those summer days, I wolfed down stories like I wolfed down her buttered carrots.

Not sure if it’s fate or coincidence, but I now live at the Jersey shore and happen to work about a mile from Aunt Lil’s former house. Sometimes on my lunch hour I drive by.

The land is divided up. The pool is filled in. There’s a garage where Uncle Vinnie’s garden used to be. The pool house is now a rundown all-season home. But the cottage is there. If you look close, there are hints of the old days. A few trees still stand, including the big holly tree that guarded the pool gate.

I’m driving by and I see the new homeowner. Despite my shy nature, I hop out of the car and introduce myself to the woman standing outside. I tell her all about Aunt Lil and the pool and the summers. I try to remember everything I can about the cottage. “They had plastic slipcovers. And the house was immaculate.”

“Well, the house is immaculate now too” she says. “My house is always clean”

“Oh, I’m sure it is. I didn’t mean to imply… I just meant…” After a few more attempts to fix things, I give up. There’s a long pause. Since I am one of those people who feels compelled to say things during moments of uncomfortable silence, I add, “I’m a librarian here in town.”

The woman pulls out her cell phone and dials a number. “My daughter is upstairs,” she tells me. Then she talks into the phone “Remember that overdue book that I told you to return? There’s someone from the library outside who wants to speak to you. You’d better get down here.”

As soon as I see a girl look out from the second story window, I’m flooded with memories. I wonder if she ever spent some quiet time in that tiny walkway on the top floor behind the stairs.

“Been telling her for days that should return the book,” says her mom.

The girl, about 15, comes bounding outside spilling out apologies. “It’s at school. But I’ll return it. I promise.”

I start to explain that I’m not here for that, but her mother cuts me off with one of those looks. So I’m quiet. And I retain my role as the book police. A new career low.

“Would it be okay if I walked over to your holly tree? It was here when there was a pool.”

The woman nods.

As I enter into the yard I hear them behind me.

“What is she looking at the tree for?” asks the girl

“I have no idea,” says her mom.

I block out their conversation and spend a moment with my tree. I touch a leaf, and I expect there to be magic. I thought it would whisper to me of summer days and moonlight swims and buttered carrots. Instead, it gives off the same what-are-you-doing-here feeling as the teen who now believes that librarians come to your door if you have an overdue book.

I have closure now. It’s not the same type of closure I expected when I hopped out of my car and said hello. But I can drive on that road and forget to look at the house. Sometimes you have to move on.

Rock Collections and Writing Superstitions.

When I was 12, I was on a swim team. Actually I was on a few of them. It was my big extracurricular activity. One November afternoon, after my mom dropped me off at the high school where we practiced, I decided it was time to take a break. Not exactly one of my better ideas. It was a chilly gray day, and there was no place to go to get away from the icy drizzle.
I stayed outside and watched through the chlorine-stained window while my team did their laps. At some point, I picked up a round stone and began scraping it against a cement wall. I was surprised that it was the rock that got marked up, not the building.
I never went inside. I never told anyone what I did. (so it's true confession time here on my blog..um sorry Mom). There was something important to me about that day. Before I got picked up from 'practice', I shoved the rock in my pocket. It was the first in my collection.
Here's my rock collection now. It's filled with memories. The ones with carved words on them ("Create." "Imagine" "Laugh" etc) are gifts from friends and family. The others I found on special days.
And that big sparkly "hope".. that came from my friend, Ann.
I call them my writing rocks. They stay near my desk. Before I send a manuscript out into the world, I print out the first page, and place it on top of the rocks and underneath the word 'hope'. It spends the night there. Yeah I know. It's a silly superstition. But I feel like all those memories and all those people have been my rocks throughout the years (I'm sorry. I couldn't resist the bad pun) and provide a foundation for all my stories. And it never hurts to have a little hope.